C-SPAN’s SOS Encourages Blaming Israel

A July 18 Washington Journal call-in segment hosted by Steve Scully about the Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine generated several (more than one-fourth the total) calls from anti-Israel phoners, all of whom were indulged by the host. Scully and C-SPAN, the television network he plays a major role in, routinely tolerate if not encourage callers (and sometimes even guests) in on-air defamation of Jews and the Jewish state. This phenomenon, potentially seen by millions of Washington Journal viewers, is a chronic problem.

Scully mishandled the July 18 anti-Israel calls. This was in keeping with his history of media malpractice regarding such calls, especially his blatant collusion with a March 18, 2014 (7:09 AM) serial anti-Israel caller.

On July 18, Scully blatantly encouraged caller “Darrell” a serial anti-Israel caller who ranted, “…Maybe the Palestinians can get some of those missiles to use on Israel, F-16s that are slaughtering Palestinian everyday, not a peep from the media and people like you. Why don’t you do a special on Israel and what they are doing in Palestine?”

Scully agreeably responded: “Well, we have, caller; we brought that up with Shane Harris. It’ll be broadcast on Sunday focusing on the incursion of the Israeli military into Gaza. Did you want to watch that program by the way?” Darrell, seemingly pleased, replied, “What time is that on?”

Eliciting only silence from Scully, two other anti-Israel callers asserted mendaciously, “President Nasser of Egypt said in 1952 that they [the Israelis] do not want peace in Israel” and “I do not know what benefit Israel is getting out of killing innocent people.”

Another caller complained, “Why are we giving Israel $3 billion a year? We’ve been giving it to them for years and years for their military. Why are we doing that?”

Typically, Scully, a senior host for a supposed public-service program, expressed no thought as to why America supplies military aid to Israel. Scully missed a chance to make at least four relevant points about the mutually beneficial relationship between America and Israel. First, financial (military only) aid to Israel constitutes only a tiny portion of the federal budget (less than 0.1 percent). Second, Israel is required by U.S. law to spend most (74 percent) of the U.S. aid ($3 billion per year) in the United States for the purchase of military materials which helps create or sustain thousands of American jobs. Third, cooperative arrangements with Israel provide technology benefits to America related to unmanned aircraft, anti-missile defenses, battlefield medical techniques – and intelligence on anti-U.S. as well as anti-Israeli Arab and Islamic radicals.

Fourth and perhaps most important in the long run, Israel, the only Western-style democracy in the Middle East, is a technologically advanced open society with equal rights for Christians and Muslims as well as Jews. Israel has women’s equality, an independent judiciary, free press and is the only country in the region where Americans could live as freely as they do at home and one that, absent religious and ethnic prejudice, ought to be an example for the Middle East’s many countries now in intra-communal upheaval.

Concerning the July fighting between Hamas, together with other Palestinian terrorist groups based in the Gaza Strip, and the Israelis – Scully and other C-SPAN hosts seemed either unable or unwilling to remind viewers that the Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip and West Bank elected Hamas, a U.S. government-designated terrorist organization, to rule them in 2006, that Hamas ousted its Palestinian Authority Fatah movement partners in a bloody “five-day war” in 2007, or that it and other terrorist groups have launched 10,000 mortars and rockets at Israel since Israel withdrew from the Strip in 2005. Journalism is news in context.

Part of the context of Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” was Hamas’ charter, anti-Western in general, genocidal toward Israel and all Jews in particular. Basing itself among noncombatants in Gaza and targeting noncombatants in Israel, these dual war crimes underlying the July fighting, apparently were outside the public affairs focus of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. In any case, the program’s cadre of anti-Israel callers, obsessively voicing unreasoned animosity toward the Jewish people and Israel, continued to find the broadcast a hospitable forum.

Failing to discharge its public service responsibilities to promote informed civic involvement, especially where Israel was concerned, amounted to another typical day for C-SPAN and Washington Journal.